Running Loose Read Free Page B

is. And she’s full of love. I mean she loves this family like love’s the mail. She delivers through rain and sleet and dark of night and conditions that are a whole lot worse than any of those.
    Don’t get me wrong. We don’t live here like the Beaver Cleaver family or the Waltons all the time. Brenda and I go at it pretty regularly. I mean, she’s forever doing things like buying me new undershorts to wear when I travel someplace, even if it’s just an away game, and throwing away my old ones.
    “Louie, I’ve seen your underpants. I know what you do.”
    I bet she doesn’t know how often.
    Just when I get them washed a few times and nice and soft and broken in, they disappear. She says how would I feel if I got in an accident and was wearing some old pair of brown and yellows. Like they’re goingto identify my body by the stains on my skivvies and leave her to live out her life in total and utter humiliation. I can see the obituary in the Trout News:
    Died. Louis Frederick Banks (1964–1982). Survived by father (Norman), mother (Brenda), sister (Tracy), and crusty undershorts (Jockey). His mother should be ashamed.
    Really, that’s the kind of arguments we get into sometimes. I don’t know how I get sucked into them, but I do. Brenda’s got heart, though, and you can go through a lot of petty little crap for that.
    I don’t think I could have gotten through this year alive without my folks. I mean, they didn’t actually do anything; but they were always there, and they did surprisingly little judging considering some of the stuff I pulled.
    Anyway, I was telling you about football. We started our two-a-day workouts the Monday after we picked up our equipment. It started like every season starts: with us sitting on the bleachers in the gym at seven-thirty in the morning in our jocks and T-shirts waiting for Lednecky to come out of his office up behind the stage to give us the opening pep talk that’s supposed to charge us up for the season. Everyone ispretty nervous because those first few practices are hell. We get a “Summer Newsletter” along about the first of July that tells us what kind of condition (“excellent, gentlemen”) he expects us to report in, but everybody puts it off till it’s too late. We know we’re going to have to run the mile right off, and if we don’t hit our time—six minutes for backs and ends, eight minutes for linemen—we’ll run it at the beginning of practice every day till we do. And if one guy misses, we all run it. (“This is a team , gentlemen.”) We also know that calisthenics will be triple what they’ll be once the season gets going since there’s no contact for the first few days until he thinks we’re ready and we’ve all had our physicals. But the killer is the wind sprints. At the end of every practice we run wind sprints until at least four guys throw up. No one believes me. They all think we run a certain number, though only Mark Robeson can say what that number is. (“Infinity, Banks. The predetermined number of wind sprints we run at the end of each practice is infinity. I’ve counted them.”) But I’ve watched for four years, and when the fourth guy chucks up his breakfast, we head for the showers. In fact, I used to wind them up early by turning away and sticking my finger down my throat right after the third guy went. We’d run one more sprint and go in.
    But no more. This year I know I’m ready. Carter and I have been working out all summer—hard. Carter’s got me ready to try out for end, Dakota’s got me pumped up to make a showing, and I’m ready to run the rest of those would-be athletes into the ground. My target is Boomer. I can’t take Carter; he’s too fast and in too good a shape. But Boomer’s been logging all summer, and though he may be strong and mean enough to eat me if he catches me, I know he can’t take me for a mile. No way. So that’s my first goal.
     
    Lednecky came down from his office with Coach Madison.